Kids coding competitions in NSW

A couple of years ago I had a cup of coffee with a local who was just starting setting up coding classes for kids. This was right on the leading edge of when they were becoming a thing and there wasn’t really a road-map about how to proceed. Since then, Nicola O’Brien’s Code Rangers have gone from strength to strength and both she and the kids she teaches have achieved some pretty cool stuff.

This is Nicola’s round-up of all the coding competitions for kids in NSW.

Coding Competitions for kids — NSW Edition

There’s a lot going on to encourage kids to code at the moment, and we all know how motivating a prize can be! We’ve taken a look at the local New South Wales competitions and there’s a lot on offer in the next few months. Coding and technology competitions each have a slightly different focus and tick different boxes. Here’s our simplest possible guide to what they’re all about so you can find the right competition for your budding techpreneurs, coders, and makers. Read to the end for details on each competition and all the links you’ll need.

Generally, competitions are a great way for students to apply what they know in a fun context, and to create something which is important to them. Coding kids can get that real-world experience of coding to solve a problem, or just polish up their coding skills by entering a competition. The task can feel daunting on the more open-ended challenges, where it’s tricky for students to go from the hazy days of brainstorming and blue sky thinking to the lonely evenings of debugging or gaffer taping. The perseverance and grit they develop though is where technology and coding competitions can be of real benefit to students, once the certificates have faded. As a parent or teacher, encouraging kids to stay on track, and break those big ideas down to manageable chunks will really help them.

As an aside, we’ve not covered robotics here as that’s a whole other topic with some amazing forums for kids that enjoy building robots and battling them or using them to solve challenges.